The inexorable advance of information technology and computing infrastructure places ever greater demands on data center management personnel and techniques. Ever more capable servers (e.g., application servers, database servers, communication servers, etc.) and storage repositories (e.g., SANs and NAS repositories) are perpetually on the horizon. Keeping up to date with the IT technology often requires consolidation to decommission the older equipment in favor of new equipment. Consolidation has many facets, such as:                Reducing the number of managed devices (e.g., servers, database engines, SANs, etc.);        Reducing the manpower spent on ongoing or periodic maintenance;        Reducing the number of ways to manage so as to streamline the management effort; and so on.        
Consolidation opportunities abound. The aforementioned managed devices can include hardware and software (e.g., preconfigured platforms) as well as other assets that can be subjected to consolidation techniques as well. For example, consolidation can serve to optimize allocation and utilization of platforms in the form of:                Software Applications;        Storage;        Shared services;        Network equipment and network bandwidth; and        Entire data centers, together with their associated human resources.        
With respect to hardware assets, especially servers, there are many benefits that accrue to consolidation. In addition to the objective of performing a workload with fewer servers, other benefits are often sought through consolidation. For example:                Reducing server maintenance costs        Reducing administration costs and complexity        Reducing energy and floor space costs        Improving disaster recovery        Accommodating future growth        Improving physical and network security        
Unfortunately most consolidation efforts are human labor-intensive manual efforts (even when bolstered by computer aided tools) and, in most cases, legacy techniques fail to account for detailed models for mapping and optimization. More specifically the time-variant aspects of a workload are often overlooked. This results in deleterious situations where, for example, a new “more than twice as big” server is commissioned ostensibly to handle the workload of say three or more smaller servers, but the legacy mapping models fail to account for time variant effects, such as very high traffic 9 am-to-5 pm, and very low traffic in the middle of the night. In the event that peak periods are coincident in the smaller servers, then the new, more than twice as big server may be over-taxed during certain time periods. In such a case, a better consolidation mapping might have been to consolidate only two of the smaller servers, and defer decommissioning of the third smaller server to a later date.
Accordingly, better consolidation techniques are needed, and more particularly, consolidation techniques that use time-variant use models as a constraint for IT resource consolidation mapping.
Moreover, the aforementioned technologies do not have the capabilities to perform time-variant use models in constraint-based IT resource consolidation. Therefore, there is a need for an improved approach.